Highly Strung
by Haina
Summary: ExT. This is their beginning. First impressions. Ever meet someone and feel you've known them for all your life?


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Disclaimer: All rights and privileges to Card Captor Sakura and all related art, characters and story are trademarks and property of CLAMP, Nelvana, Kodansha, NEP21, Tokyo Pop and associated parties. The characters of these works are used without permission for the purpose of entertainment only. I, Hally Dang, do not claim Card Captor Sakura and all related art, characters and story as my own property.

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Highly Strung  
_by Hally Dang_

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i. grace; world on fire

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The days were getting shorter. She could feel November slipping through the pavement cracks. The chill in the air was seeping underneath her skin. And so she spent the day waiting for the weather to lift. Looking up to the morose wintry sky, dreary-filled with things forgotten.

Tomoyo have always known herself to be a child of summer. She felt heavy, listless, and somber beneath the gray and overcast firmament. It was as if she was falling through the depth of space; breathless, weightless.

It was still early in the afternoon, but the sky had dimmed. She followed the small rocky trail down the river towards the bridge. It was one of those days when time itself had slowed down. A chilly gust rushed in from the water. The coldness pressed against her skin made her shiver.

The wind sent her long hair into an unruly mess of charcoal in the air. But she didn't mind.

Tomoyo enjoyed the silence, the calmness of the river just two weeks before the winter. The river seemed to be bubbling more freely as if it knew that it would soon be frozen and still. Gushing unhindered and deliberately, the river was careless.

She pulled her coat closer to herself.

The bridge was slowing coming into view. It was one of those intricate white marble bridges of the Victorian Era, flowing with elegant arches and decorative piers. It was a elevated structure of pureness and white under the dismal glacial clouds.

She saw him then.

A dark figure standing by the bridge. He was a tall shadow below the old ivory light of the towering street lamp.

He titled his head to look up towards the sky. His eyes were squinted, as if looking for something magnificent and profound up within the dark gray wisps and crevasses of the clouds, with hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his overcoat.

His presence was incongruous. He was a wander, a lost soul adrift within the black hole of time and space.

Yet, she stopped, entranced by the contours of his silhouette, his eclipse. A vision, perhaps. She could have sworn he wasn't real, almost.

In a moment of immense revelation, Tomoyo knew she have been falling all her life with heaven slipping from her grasp and the ground rushing up to receive her.

He turned from the sky, then as if on cue, looked at her. His eyes were the color of splendor: a dark malleable tint, esoteric and ornate. Like sapphires made from the light of midnight fireflies.

She's been falling for too long. Then, within a second of measureless joy, it was as if he was there to catch her. She was falling into him. Over and over again.

He smiled, ever so slightly. There was bliss-her bliss-within his gaze. It was hard to breathe, for Tomoyo knew she had known him forever.

She still had the taste of him under her tongue from another lifetime.

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ii. surrender; underwater curls

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He couldn't tell how long he had been standing there. Time was lost on him, a trivial concept. He was a traveler of ages, living from shadows and orifices. He was still young, however his spirit was wan.

Each breath was a burden: he was tired, heavy like the sky that morning. He felt that he had lived for too long, seen too much. There was no purpose now. He ached for peace and for a chance to hold eternity in the palm of his hand.

He was disjoined from what was real; condemned to a fate without definition. All was lost on him.

Heaven was sinking with grief of the coming winter and wrought with bleak meditation. Eriol looked up to the immense firmament and contemplated the impossible. Answers eluded him.

A coldness settled over him, reminding him that it was approaching winter in the city.

Eriol strain to see the exact color of the sky between patches of white and gray. Squinting his eyes, he thought perhaps he'd found something there.

It must've been hours. It must've been forever.

Then, he felt her. She came to him like a piece of summer. Touching him through the void, like echoes of angels that won't be heard.

He turned in the direction of her footfalls. Her hair was the color of ashes. He had never seen ash colored hair or anything comparable. The long locks were afloat in the air. Her skin was ceramic. She was a china doll; delicate and ethereal.

Eriol had lived through lifetimes. He was a pilgrim of ages, through heartbreaks and failures. The world settled into a monotone, he was too worn to feel anymore.

He did not believe in love at first sight but she came to him like gentle August rain. Eriol knew she was the stuff of happily ever after's.

It had never been so clear to him before. He had been looking for her all his life, yet he had known her all his life. He must've lost her some place between the spaces in another time.

He knew the smell of her hair, the taste of her skin: sandalwood and lavender. Like a pleasant childhood memories of the South, she was a piece of his end, his beginning.

It was like an epiphany.

Eriol had thought he have lived forever, only he never live until he saw the color of her eyes. He found heaven in her gaze. It was peace, Shantih.

She was his undoing, his creation.

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iii. what if it all means something

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Perhaps, it was all just a serendipitous accident. Maybe everything happens for a reason. Does it matter in the end?

"Hey."

"Yeah."

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Like that.

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Author's Notes: "Highly Strung" is named after a song by Bond. I don't actually like the song all that much, but the title somehow stuck. This came about from scraps and scribbles I've written over the past few months.

With heavy overtones of Blake and Eliot. Shantih, as used here, means a peace that passes understanding. It is a formal ending to an Upanishad.

I think I've written so much about good-byes, I've forgotten about the beginnings.

Enjoy. Please review before you leave.


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